“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
Reminders of death seem to be everywhere in the fall. In addition to the trees gradually stripped bare of their dying leaves, skeletons, ghosts and headstones spring up like gruesome flowers for Halloween.
While it is easy enough to brush by decorations and crunchy leaves, facing the reality of suffering and death in our own lives without fear is a different story.
In my year of reading one spiritual classic a month, in the month of October I took up the account of one priest who faced the reality of death and suffering in brutal prisons and learned to “fear no evil.”
“He Leadeth Me” is the story of Servant of God Father Walter Ciszek, a Polish-American priest who set out to minister to the Russian people and was imprisoned in the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1963.
Father Ciszek entered Russia with a fellow priest, following a strong call they felt to missionary service there. They found work in a lumber camp and were met initially with discouragement in their inability to reach their fellow workers who were fearful of any mention of religion due to the daily Soviet surveillance and hostility to religion.
Ultimately, he saw that the dilemma they faced came from an “inability to work as we thought God would surely want us to work, instead of accepting the situation itself as his will.”
“His will is what he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems,” he wrote. “The trick is to learn to see that — not just in theory, or not just occasionally in a flash of insight granted by God’s grace, but every day.”
His faith would meet a great challenge shortly after this realization. He and others who had entered the country to work were arrested as German spies. He was sent to the infamous Lubianka prison in Moscow where he was tortured and interrogated, facing the charge of being a Vatican spy.
After a year of interrogations and solitary confinement, he signed a false confession upon being threatened with execution. Overwhelmed by his failure in signing the document, he realized that he had put his faith in his own ability to outwit his interrogators rather than putting himself in God’s hands.
“We were created to do God’s will and not our own, to make our own wills conform to his and not vice versa,” he reflected. “We can promise quite easily in prayer that we will do it. What we fail to see is how much of self still resides in that promise, how much we are trusting in our own powers when we say that we will do it. God must sometimes allow us to act on our own so we can learn humility, so we can learn the truth of our total dependence on him, so we can learn that all our actions are sustained by his grace and that without him we can do nothing — not even make our own mistakes.”
Following a period of despair and uncertainty after he had signed the confession, Father Ciszek found peace in a radical surrender to God’s will.
“I had talked of finding and doing his will, but never in the sense of totally giving up my own will. I had talked of trusting him, indeed I truly had trusted him, but never in the sense of abandoning all other sources of support and relying on his grace alone,” he wrote. “Only when I had reached a point of total bankruptcy of my own powers had I at last surrendered.”
After an additional four years in Lubianka, he was sent to a Siberian labor camp where he did grueling manual labor with barely adequate food and rest.
And yet here he was excited to have the ability to say Mass again in secret with the help of sympathetic prisoners. His observations about their devotion to the Eucharist are a sobering example to those who find it difficult to go to Mass or observe the current requirement to fast only an hour before receiving Communion.
“I have seen priests pass up breakfast and work at hard labor on an empty stomach until noon in order to keep the Eucharistic fast,” he recalled. At times, “the prisoners would actually fast all day long and do exhausting physical labor without a bite to eat since dinner the evening before, just to be able to receive the Holy Eucharist — that was how much the sacrament meant to them in this otherwise God-forsaken place.”
Following his release, he was kept in the Soviet Union under surveillance and observed that “death is very nearly a taboo subject in the communist milieu. In an ideology of atheistic materialism, death is obviously the end of everything for a man.”
But he found there was a great appetite among the Russian people still for belief in the afterlife. “I found it especially among the simple people, the good people, for whom the desire or the expectation of an afterlife was not a fantasy or an illusion, as they so often heard it described by communist propagandists,” he wrote. “Death to them was not an end, but a beginning, a passage into eternal life. They took joy in the fact that they would one day be together with their loved ones again.”
“Salvation, these simple people would say, is not measured in terms of how well we make out in what we do here on earth; it depends ultimately on our belief in God and our abandonment in him.” In this belief these people held on to he saw “something that all the theologians and books of theology could not match in their approach to death. That I should find it in the Soviet Union startled me at first. It taught me much.”
Reflecting on the people’s faith helped him to see that, for the Christian, death “means no more and no less than the end of our testing period here on earth; it is a return, a going home, to the God and Father who first created us. It is not the end of life; the fact of the resurrection proves that beyond a doubt.”
While many decades have passed since Father Walter Ciszek’s time in Soviet Russia, his work provides timeless spiritual insight into seeing the will of God in the things set before us each day and surrendering to God in the great trials of our lives. Such a lifetime of learning to surrender to the one who has conquered death helps us to see death in a new light, without fear, as a passage into new life.
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